With the advent of free and low cost email services, many users now have multiple email accounts. In the past, business and personal accounts were usually separate, but now many users have multiple email accounts for personal use. These accounts may differ based on the security afforded to each account. For example, an email account that is very secure might be used for financial accounts, while another less secure account might be used to receive marketing information and the target of spam. Using multiple accounts in this way can mitigate security risks, but this method creates problems with archiving and searching for past information. The user may not remember what email was used for a particular purpose at the time, or the email account may not be used at all.
Additionally, the current email trend emphasize web-based email services that are accessible anywhere with any browser such as those available from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. The client does is not required to have access to a local storage to persistently store email message. However, with web-based email services, users are left without an archive solution. Further, even with personal storage files, the user has no way to perform a search on all the email accounts. Each personal storage file must be opened and searched.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.